The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  The sheriff decided not to disturb the scene. They drove back to Tatum’s house. The sheriff called the OSBI office in McAlester. The agent there said he was too busy to come down, but that he would notify the crime lab in Oklahoma City; they would send someone.

  Two OSBI lab technicians arrived at Holdenville in early afternoon. The dispatcher sent them out to Gerty. They met up at the grocery store with Sheriff Rose and Undersheriff Trivitt; Allan Tatum stayed home. The sheriff led the technicians to the site.

  They took photographs. They placed the skull in a paper sack, along with what other bones they could find: rib bones, finger bones. They took the soles of the tennis shoes, the frayed pieces of cloth. The largest piece was the waistband of blue jeans. It was marked “Size 9.”

  Sheriff Rose produced a rake, began to rake the leaves around where they had found the skull. He came upon something bright and shiny: an earring, white-gold in appearance, with a bit of red in it.

  Between the earring and the size 9 waistband, they were fairly sure the remains were of a woman.

  Not far from the shoe soles, they found two white socks, about half-knee-length. Inside the socks were toe bones. In another spot they found the zipper of the jeans.

  The sun, still warm for January, caught the light color of some of the bones; others were uncovered as the men continued to rake the leaves in an area about forty feet across. They found leg bones, arm bones, a pelvis. Perhaps eight or ten ribs. One of the lab men, wearing gloves, placed each find carefully in a paper sack.

  Before they placed the skull in the sack, the men studied it. Near the back were two holes, one on each side. They looked to Sheriff Rose like bullet holes, as if a bullet had been fired into the back of the head on one side, and had come out the other side. The hole was too big for a .22-caliber, he guessed; it must have been at least a .38.

  It was nearly four in the afternoon when they left the scene. Rose and Trivitt drove back to Holdenville. The lab men—with the bones, the bits of fabric, the single earring—drove back to Oklahoma City, where the medical examiner found a tiny bullet fragment in the skull they brought.

  By chance, District Attorney Bill Peterson was working in Holdenville that day; it was part of his three-county jurisdiction. Sheriff Rose found Peterson in the office of his assistant. He told the D.A. they had found a body out near Gerty.

  “Did that Haraway girl have a lot of fillings in her upper teeth?” Rose asked.

  Bill Peterson said yes; her father-in-law was a dentist; she had a lot of fillings.

  “How was she dressed?” the sheriff asked.

  Tennis shoes and blue jeans, Bill Peterson said.

  “Then I’m pretty sure this will be her,” the sheriff said. “That’s what we found out there.”

  Hearing of the fillings, the blue jeans, the tennis shoes, the size 9 waistband, Bill Peterson was fairly certain, too, that they had found Donna Denice Haraway at last.

  The date was January 21, 1986—the day on which, prior to their stays, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot had been scheduled to be executed.

  The fact of the discovery of a skeleton near Gerty was kept secret that night. Even Dennis Smith, the detective captain, did not learn of it until Chris Ross mentioned it at police headquarters the following day. Ross said they suspected it might be Denice Haraway; he was on his way to Dr. Haraway’s office, to get her dental charts, her dental X-rays.

  The detective captain met the assistant D.A. at the dentist’s office. They stood outside and discussed the possible new evidence, beneath the windows of the apartment in which Steve and Denice had lived. Ross went inside and talked with Dr. Haraway, who had already been told of the find. He came out with Denice’s dental impressions. Smith took them and drove, with Mike Baskin, ninety miles to the state medical examiner’s office in Oklahoma City, to deliver them personally.

  It was about 6 P.M. when they got there. The office was already closed. The detectives left the impressions with a night attendant, and returned to Ada. Positive identification would have to wait till morning.

  Smith was excited during the drive up and back. From what Ross had told him, there were strong indications it was Denice: proof positive of what he’d assumed from the very first night, that she was dead. The thoughts that ran through his mind he put into spoken words a few days later: “Someone had already looked at the teeth that had been found, and had unofficially said it looked like her. I was pretty excited at her being found. I knew there was a bullet hole in the head. [But] nothing was going to surprise me in this case. The location wasn’t really going to surprise me because of the different areas that we had searched.”

  Hughes County had not been searched during the investigation. “Ward and Fontenot’s statement said it was out west of town. Initially the people at the scene said the vehicle went east, and in the initial search they searched out east and south and that area. There are so many possibilities. They could have gone west first. In Tommy’s statement he said that after he got through raping her, he said they were cuttin’ on her and he decided he didn’t want anything more to do with it and he went home. He said after he got home he was washing up or something and he got to thinking about them leaving her body up there, and the police might find her close to his house. I don’t know, it’s hard to really say what actually did happen. Only they really know. From him saying that, you can kind of—he’s thinking about the police finding that body, so he goes back. That’s what he says. He goes back. It’s conceivable that the body may have been there and he may have loaded the body back up, in whatever kind of vehicle. He could have gone around the loop. There are so many ways of getting to where the body was found. There are so many likelihoods, possibilities. With him being out there so close to his house. He knew all that area. But, on the other hand, it’s always conceivable that he could have gone east from the store, and gone straight out there. We had wondered ourselves [why they would go through the center of town on a Saturday night].”

  About the evidence that a gun had been used, and had not been mentioned on the tapes, Smith said, “Well, I don’t know. It really didn’t surprise me. I’m open for game on anything anymore. Anything’s conceivable. I can see ’em just making damn sure she’s dead before they left her. That would be the final act, a gunshot to the head.”

  When the detectives arrived back in Ada from the medical examiner’s office that night, Mike Baskin telephoned Pat Virgin, Denice’s mother, in Purcell, to tell her they had found a body, that while it had not yet been definitely confirmed, it probably was Denice.

  “It was good news for us that the body was found,” Smith said. “The family acted as if they were relieved to know that her body had been found. Where she was at and everything.”

  The next morning, in Oklahoma City, the state medical examiner compared the dental impression of Denice Haraway’s teeth, delivered by the detectives, with the upper jaw in the skull found at Gerty. It was a perfect match. The identification was now positive. The skeleton found at Gerty was that of Donna Denice Haraway.

  The identification was given out to the media. Tommy Ward heard it on a borrowed TV set in his cell.

  Ward was frightened by the report. He asked for the telephone, called his mother’s house in Tulsa, spoke to his brother Melvin. He told Melvin he’d been hoping Denice Haraway would turn up alive; that way everyone would know for sure that he didn’t do it. Now there was no chance of that.

  Melvin calmed Tommy down. He told him that now perhaps the police would find evidence that proved someone else did it.

  Tommy called a friend. “I was hoping and praying she was still alive,” he said. “I’m gritting my teeth and hoping they’ll find evidence that proves I didn’t do it.”

  “I never even heard of Gerty,” Tommy said. “I heard of Atwood, because you pass it on the way to McAlester. But I never heard of Gerty.”

  Karl Fontenot also saw the report in his cell. It made him feel good, he said, for two reasons. One was that the woman had be
en shot, and his tape said nothing about shooting. The other was that she’d been found a long way from where it said on the tape she’d been put. “Maybe now they’ll see the tape was all lies,” he said.

  In Ada, District Attorney Peterson was answering questions from the press about the finding of the body, about whether it would affect the convictions of Ward and Fontenot.

  “Why would it?” Peterson said. “We convicted them without a body, and now we have one.”

  He said the finding of the body simply confirmed the justness of the convictions. “They sent us out looking north, south, and west,” he said. “Every direction but the right one. I should have known to look east. They said they put her in a bunker. Everything stands up except what they did with the body.”

  Peterson told the press Ms. Haraway had been stabbed in the chest and shot once in the head, “according to the medical examiner.” This statement would be reported in the media in Ada and throughout the state—that Denice had been stabbed and shot. “Nothing found so far proves their innocence,” Peterson said.

  Across town, in his office on Arlington, Don Wyatt had a different reaction. “If the body suffered a gunshot wound,” he said, “this cuts against what they were trying to prove. They said the instrument of death was a lock-blade knife. If the body was clothed, this cuts against what they were trying to prove. If there was a blouse on it, I’d like to know a description of the blouse, if it was different. The people their witnesses saw on Richardson Loop must have been someone else. I heard OSBI chemists have had the body. We need to see what they found. Is there any physical evidence out there that ties the body to the defendants? We don’t know. Or to anyone else? I don’t know how hard they’re going to look out there. They feel they have their convictions.”

  In late fall, Bud Wolf had bought a small black-and-white TV set to replace the color one that had been burned out by lightning before the trial. Bud and Tricia were watching it Wednesday night when the first unofficial announcement about the finding of a body was made. Tricia was watching it in the living room Thursday morning when the identification of Denice Haraway was made official. Her first reaction was a sick feeling. She felt that Tommy and Karl were now doomed. She had been hoping that Denice Haraway was alive. She had known Denice was dead, but had been hoping she was alive—both for Tommy’s sake and for the sake of the Haraways.

  In the afternoon she read the Ada News, as most of the town was doing. The headline “Haraway’s remains are found” crossed the top of the front page, beside the old yearbook picture of Denice. The story in the newspaper contained more details than had been mentioned on television. It told of the blue jeans, the tennis shoes, the earring being found. It did not mention a blouse. And it contained Bill Peterson’s comment that the finding of the body would not affect the case.

  After her first feeling of doom, Tricia grew hopeful again. Perhaps they could trace the bullet fragment to a gun that would lead to the killer, she thought. Maybe they would find the gun itself, or something else that the killer dropped.

  And she grew suspicious. If they had found blue jeans and tennis shoes, she wondered, why hadn’t they found a blouse? She knew the blouse was the key. If they had found a blouse, she figured, and it was different from the one on the tapes, that would prove the police had fed Tommy and Karl the story on the tapes. Because how else would Tommy and Karl know about Denice having a blouse with little blue flowers, if she hadn’t been wearing it?

  The hopes and the suspicions and the fears all ran together in her mind. Like Don Wyatt, she wondered how hard the authorities would look for evidence that might clear Tommy and Karl.

  Richard Kerner was out of town that day. He did not hear of the discovery of the body until the TV news that night.

  His first thought was “She was shot!” That, he felt, cast further doubt on the confession tapes.

  His second thought was of Jason Lurch’s grandmother. The investigator had visited the grandmother when he was first trying to locate Lurch. He’d learned that Lurch had lived with her for a time, had once shoved his grandmother so hard she fell down and broke an arm or a hip. The place she lived—where Lurch had once lived—was called Centrahoma. It was in an open area of trees and scrub and hills. If you drove north from Centrahoma on Highway 75, the first community you could turn off to, about twenty miles to the north, was Gerty.

  Kerner’s next thought was of Larry Jett, standing among the plaster birds and Bambis in the yard ornaments shop, lying to him about having lived in Kansas at the time Denice Haraway disappeared. Larry Jett, the investigator recalled, looked a lot like Tommy Ward. And he came from Allen, the closest village to Gerty. The place the body had been found was a no-man’s-land about one-third down from Allen and two-thirds up from Centrahoma. Both Lurch and Jett could be familiar with the area, Kerner figured.

  The investigator had never relinquished his suspicion of Lurch for having attended every scattered day of the preliminary hearing, and then for not attending the trial; and for Karen Wise and Jim Moyer thinking they might have seen him that night. A combined scenario formed in the investigator’s mind: the real killers might have been Lurch and Jett, in Lurch’s nephew’s truck.

  And yet all of his suspicions, Kerner knew, proved nothing.

  The officers who had been working on the case from the beginning—Dennis Smith, Gary Rogers, Mike Baskin—wanted to see the spot where Denice Haraway had been found. They also wanted to search for more evidence there. A weapon, perhaps. More bones. More clothing. The story in the Ada News had quoted Bill Peterson as saying a complete rib cage had been found. That was not the case. Some rib bones were missing, and it was on the rib bones that evidence of stabbing was most likely to appear. So they wanted to find more rib bones, with stab marks.

  None of the published accounts had mentioned anything about a blouse or top being found. Dennis Smith had heard that when the lab technicians removed the skeleton, under it, on the leaves, they had found evidence of a blouse. It was so decayed, so fragile, that if they had tried to touch it, it would have disintegrated. But the lab men had photographed it, Smith had been told. It was pale lavender, with little blue flowers on it.

  If this was true, it had not been made public.

  The three officers decided to meet at police headquarters Friday morning and go out to Gerty to conduct their own search. They would be joined by Bruce Johnson, a new investigator for the district attorney’s office; by another detective; and by Sheriff Rose of Hughes County, who could show them the place.

  Detective Smith arose early, as always, to distribute the Oklahoman through the town before going to work. A story about the finding of Denice Haraway’s body appeared on the lower part of the front page, and continued inside. He paused to read it—and his blood pressure rose as he read the last part of the story. It consisted of comments the reporter had obtained from Don Wyatt, who had not been quoted in the Ada News.

  Wyatt was quoted as saying the finding of the body would help the defendants in their appeals. The story continued:

  “The description of that blouse was fed to them by the police” during their interrogation, the lawyer said.

  “That’s how the police got those confessions. They kept going over and over on them until they gave them those stories to get them off their backs,” Wyatt said.

  “They thought the police would eventually disprove their stories and [they would] be released.

  “But that wasn’t the case. The police chose to believe those cock and bull stories,” Wyatt said.

  The detective was incensed by Wyatt’s statements. He was furious as he met the others at headquarters, as they climbed into a black unmarked car, Smith at the wheel, and drove east on Arlington toward Gerty. As they passed Don Wyatt’s expensive law building, which happened to be on the route, Smith suddenly swung the car to the right, up the short, steep driveway, and into the parking lot behind the red brick building. It was 8:30 in the morning. The lot was empty, the building not yet open. />
  Frustrated, the detective captain turned the car around and started back toward the driveway. As he did, a van swung off the road into the driveway. The van was wide; there was not enough space for the car and the van to pass in the drive. Smith backed up his car. The van came up the drive, then paused beside the car. The driver of the van was Winifred Harrell; she was often the first of Don Wyatt’s employees to arrive at work.

  Winifred did not recognize the black car. But she saw Dennis Smith behind the wheel. She rolled down her window to talk. She liked Dennis, thought he was a fine person. Way back ten years ago, she and her first husband, and Dennis and Sandi, sometimes took vacations together. Their contact since had always been friendly. He had chatted with her amiably during the trial. Just a few weeks before, doing Christmas shopping in Oklahoma City, she had run into Dennis and Sandi and one of their boys, and they’d had a nice chat.

  The detective rolled down the window of the car. Winifred smiled.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, wondering why the police would be at Wyatt’s office so early in the morning.

  “When you see Don Wyatt,” Smith said, “you tell him I said, ‘Bullshit.’”

  “What?” Winifred said. She was taken aback. Smith had not even said good morning.

  “When you see Don Wyatt,” the detective repeated, “you tell him I said, ‘Bullshit.’”

  “He’s in Muskogee today,” Winifred said. “But what’s going on, Dennis? What’s the problem?”

  “Read the Daily Oklahoman,” Smith said, “and tell him I said, ‘Bullshit.’”